Bennett traces the sisters' lives from childhood in their father's drapery shop in provincial Bursley, England, during the mid-Victorian era, through their married lives, to the modern industrial age, when they are reunited as old women. The setting moves from the Five Towns of Staffordshire to exotic and cosmopolitan Paris, while the action moves from the subdued domestic routine of the Baines household to the siege of Paris during the Franco-Prussian War.

With a New Introduction by Francine Prose, the author of thirteen books of fiction. Francine is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the New York Public Library's Center for Scholars and Writers.

Commentary by Rebecca West, W. Somerset Maugham, Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, Henry James, and J. B. Priestley.

"Like Wordsworth, [Arnold Bennett] has triumphed over the habitual; he has not let it disguise the particle of beauty from him."
   REBECCA WEST